CIC Guide: Continuous Delivery Realization Enterprise DevOps realities and a path towards Continuous Delivery A Creative Intellect Consulting Guide Report This guide offers directions for improving the collaboration between IT development and operations teams, and a path towards Continuous Delivery. Continuous Delivery is synonymous with an ability to increase software release rates. This provides IT organizations with the capacity and flexibility for reacting to the changing demands of their business clients. One such demand is support for driving competitive advantage. Our direction is determined by exploring the collaborations between IT development and IT operations being employed by a cross section of organizations across the market landscape. We also investigate their understanding of, and capacity for, Continuous Delivery within the context of development and operational interactions. Ultimately, it is a guide that looks to identify the various applications and deployment models for Continuous Delivery, with a focus on exploring the different points of “trust” when Continuous Delivery can occur effectively. This guide also profiles the support delivered to improving Enterprise development and operations relations (DevOps) by Serena Software’s Release Management and Automation portfolio. In particular, the guide looks at the vendor’s goals for enabling organizations to better cater for Continuous Delivery for the most appropriate application targets. Bola Rotibi, Research Director, Creative Intellect Consulting Ian Murphy, Principal Analyst, Creative Intellect Consulting April 2013 Creative Intellect Consulting is an analyst research, advisory and consulting firm focused on software development, delivery and lifecycle management across the Software and IT spectrum along with their impact on, and alignment with, business. Read more about our services and reports at www.creativeintellectuk.com © Creative Intellect Consulting Ltd 2013 Page 1 Table of Contents Executive Summary ...................................................................................................................... 3 Ten guide points to establishing an environment geared for Continuous Delivery (CD) .................. 7 The Guide in Detail: Defining Continuous Delivery ........................................................................ 9 Realizing the cadence for Continuous Delivery .................................................................................. 11 Continuous Delivery attributes in focus: ............................................................................................ 13 Continuous Delivery Application ........................................................................................................ 16 Enterprise DevOps: A focus for IT agility and adaptability ............................................................ 21 Serena’s Continuous Delivery and DevOps Foundations .............................................................. 25 © Creative Intellect Consulting Ltd 2013 Page 2 Executive Summary Businesses want something different, something that can enable them to capture new markets. They want IT to deliver competitive advantage, not once a year, but on a continuous rolling basis. The success of companies such as Amazon, Apple, SalesForce, Google and Facebook show that this can be done. Software can be delivered quickly and reliably, leading to massive growth in the customer base and increased revenues. There is, of course, a significant difference between many Enterprise customers and those organizations listed above. For many IT departments, delivering software quickly and reliably is not easily achievable, given the processes in use. Enterprise customers have complex, hybrid infrastructure environments and platforms (mainframes, minicomputers, distributed computing platforms) and multiple endpoint devices. Their infrastructure contains components that may be decades old, but which are still running critical applications. The software that they are using can also be old, meaning running critical systems can be hard to replace. Finally, the processes that the enterprises are using will generally have evolved over time to accommodate multiple generations of IT. The aim of this report is to determine real world approaches for development and operations collaborations, and the application environments and organizational maturity where Continuous Delivery can be applied effectively. It also looks to help establish the mapping between existing ITIL/ITSM transformation strategies and the transition to Continuous Delivery and Cloud provisioning. In doing so, we aim to establish a definition for Continuous Delivery and the attributes for Enterprise DevOps that reflects the reality of what organizations are looking to achieve – namely to improve the speed and frequency of deploying quality software and become a more adaptable and agile IT organization. Input from “On the ground” experiences As part of the research for this report, Creative Intellect Consulting Ltd (www.creativeintellectuk.com) interviewed a wide range of organizations. Respondents came mainly from large and small enterprises, as well as release management and continuous development and deployment consultants dealing with the following markets: US government departments, global financial institutions, European tax and revenue offices, automotive, retail and healthcare. The goal of each interview was to understand: existing operational and development processes; the level of focus on DevOps concerns; strategies for moving towards Continuous Delivery; the levels of self-service support; considerations for Cloud services and future needs. We sought to understand what was happening in practice, the technology and the process gaps and what was needed to meet the changing demands of the business. Rather than presenting the interviews in detail, this report looks at the patterns and approaches that are common (or, where relevant, different). A need for DevOps For many organizations out in the market place, the workflows within IT development and operations teams are generally well established. There are relatively solid operational processes in place, particularly for workflows like continuous integration and release management, that target a single platform technology (Java, .NET, Mainframes). Unfortunately, the right collaborations and communication between these two important stakeholder teams are not always well coordinated or orchestrated. In some extreme cases they are not even taking place, with development teams metaphorically throwing their delivered code or application modifications “over the wall” to the operations team. © Creative Intellect Consulting Ltd 2013 Page 3 Welcomed acknowledgement for a “DevOps” focus Within the organizations interviewed, there is great appetite for improving the operational processes as well as the collaboration and alignment between the development and operations teams. Many of those interviewed had attained reasonable levels of maturity in their IT organizational processes, although not all processes were consistently applied throughout. There was keen awareness for having in place important operational processes, as defined by the ITIL and ITSM libraries, and best practices to help support throughput gains made from agile development procedures. However, while ITIL and ITSM provided the foundations for many improvement strategies, the level of consistent support and implementation was patchy. A vision for Continuous Delivery... The task of Continuous Delivery is a growing focus area for both IT development and operations organizations, particularly with respect to supporting a level of service automation and business agility with the fast deployment of desired services. The number of releases varies per organization, but there is no doubt that many would like it to be on an upward trajectory. Of those interviewed, many felt that “Continuous Delivery” was an initiative that aligned well with the ability to release more, no matter who is executing the release management process. So it is about smoothing the path to production deployment. Some of those interviewed see the potential of mobile apps; not business critical, but an opportunity to see the development team deploy directly to an internal App Store environment hosted via the Cloud. ...but a lack of clarity in its application The capacity for Continuous Delivery is not always well understood, especially in the context of development and operational throughput. Many organizations are looking to understand how the ITIL/ITSM model, which they have begun to use to transform and improve their operational processes, maps to support both Continuous Delivery and Cloud provisioning. The drive for Continuous Delivery presents a mandate for DevOps One of the insights that a drive for Continuous Delivery firmly exposes, is that it is about how you manage the process between IT development and operations teams to create a smother bridge and progression path to deployment. It is not about trying to create a third “DevOps” department that is made up of the other two. Organizations need to stop with the mindset of thinking about having a DevOps manager, a DevOps this and DevOps that. Once lead roles within both teams work on how to manage handover and making the processes smoother and not a step of stop start points, organizations will find that DevOps becomes a given. Ultimately DevOps is about process integration with the right level of collaboration